Wide Sky · Vessel
Farsower
Lead hull of the Ferren Ostry-diaspora convoy — the speaker's hull, The Closing Sky.
Designation
bulk-hauler (salvaged)
Complement
(no crew figure on the page; **~300 souls aboard** — passengers and crew undivided, B3 Ch9)
T5 The Guttering Age · 2312–2349 Merchant derived
What her era can carry. Full ordinary armament: coil and rail accelerators · finite kinetic magazines · guided munitions and interceptor missiles · point-defence guns · defensive and sensor-directed lasers · drones, decoys and electronic warfare · advanced kinetic boarding and surface weapons.
The boundary-weapon family exists and is constrained — expensive, signature-heavy, politically fraught. Most hulls of this era are civilian and carry nothing. ⚠ Ordinary traversal needs no chain; a merchant hull is a merchant hull.
Merchant. Holds and margins. Ordinarily unarmed; a merchant with a magazine is a plot point, not a default.
⚠ A ceiling, not a fit — what a hull of this class could carry in this era, derived from the capability ladder rather than stated for this ship. She may well carry less; she is never shown carrying more. Source: Era tier T5 (bible/48 §2) · role inferred from class/description.
The record
Class and design
A salvaged bulk hauler with "her holds opened out into one long living-deck, three hundred souls in her if she carried one" (Ch9). Established fabric, all from B3 prose:
Runs lightless by choice. "Nobody had ordered the Farsower run lightless. The Ferren simply did not trust a bright hull in anyone's sky" (Ch9) — five generations of going dark under raiders, kept sharp by a year in Earth's rationed corridor.
Refit and condition
Salvage throughout — an old hauler stripped for people rather than cargo. No refit or damage entry: she is not recorded as taking fire. The 200 dead of the transit are the ore-hauler caught at first blood (88), the collier (71) and the second reach-built keel (41) — none of them this hull.
Crew
Unnamed but on the page: her pilots; a keeper of the deck (a broad woman with a tally-slate and a nursing infant); a girl of about six whose name Sethi takes into the field book. The Veray envoy Rade sends comes aboard in Ch16 (unnamed).
Authority
None external. Ferren self-government: the speaker speaks for the convoy, and each hull's master answers for his own keel — Sethi takes the crossing consent master by master, "keel by keel down the slot," and logs each yes before giving that master his lane (Ch20).
Related hulls
The convoy's other hulls: the collier bedded "two decks under the Farsower's spine" with three generations of one household aboard (Ch16; lost, 71 dead, Ch20–21); the reach-built keels; the broad reach-built Ferren hull that holds back to lift the Dawnward's crew and crosses last (Ch21, unnamed). Escort/adversary hulls: Dawnward (Survey), Merrick's picket, the coalition wing.
Compiled from the canon file for this hull. Only sections that are settled canon are shown — drafting notes and anything belonging to an unpublished book are held back.